The Quest to Map the Inside of the Proton
[ad_1] “How are matter and energy distributed?” asked Peter Schweitzer, a theoretical physicist at the University of Connecticut. “We don’t know.” Schweitzer has spent most of his career thinking about…
A Popular Alien-Hunting Technique Is Increasingly in Doubt
[ad_1] The third factor is the probability of a lifeless planet producing the observed signal—an equally serious challenge, researchers now realize, that’s tangled up in the problem of unconceived abiotic…
Scientists Are Unlocking the Secrets of Your ‘Little Brain’
[ad_1] The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In recent decades, neuroscience has seen some stunning advances, and yet a critical part of the brain remains a…
Large Language Models’ Emergent Abilities Are a Mirage
[ad_1] The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Two years ago, in a project called the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark, or BIG-bench, 450 researchers compiled a…
Never-Repeating Patterns of Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information
[ad_1] This extreme fragility might make quantum computing sound hopeless. But in 1995, the applied mathematician Peter Shor discovered a clever way to store quantum information. His encoding had two…
Selective Forgetting Can Help AI Learn Better
[ad_1] The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A team of computer scientists has created a nimbler, more flexible type of machine learning model. The trick: It…
This Is What Your Brain Does When You’re Not Doing Anything
[ad_1] The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Whenever you’re actively performing a task—say, lifting weights at the gym or taking a hard exam—the parts of your…
There’s a New Theory About Where Dark Matter Is Hiding
[ad_1] But there may be opportunities to indirectly spot the signatures of those gravitons. One strategy Vafa and his collaborators are pursuing draws on large-scale cosmological surveys that chart the…
Google’s Chess Experiments Reveal How to Boost the Power of AI
[ad_1] His group decided to find out. They built the new, diversified version of AlphaZero, which includes multiple AI systems that trained independently and on a variety of situations. The…
A Celebrated Cryptography-Breaking Algorithm Just Got an Upgrade
[ad_1] This is a job for LLL: Give it (or its brethren) a basis of a multidimensional lattice, and it’ll spit out a better one. This process is known as…